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17th Issue

editor's note

Space re-inscribed and camouflaged

With the demarcation line conclusively drawn to separate the 'authorial' art from that of the 'performative', the creative being is unhinged from ontology (of being) 'in favour of spatio-temporal dynamics'.  Read

writes MUSTAFA ZAMAN
obituary

A requiem for Subir Chowdhury

The passing away of Subir Chowdhury was sudden. At the age of 61 he succumbed to neurological cancer on June 30, 2014, in Sydney, Australia, following his admittance to a local hospital while Read

newsscape

Chhobir Haat at a glance

As the very first public space co-opted by artists fresh out of the academia, Chhobir Haat came under the glare of attention by regularly staging art exhibitions, film shows, musical  Read

Framing Bangladesh through the lens

The exhibition entitled Bangladesh in Frames 6 became a site of novel transmission by the group that goes by the name of Through the Lens: Bangladesh (TTL). In the 6th edition,  Read

War and Colonies, 1914-1918: a look back at the forgotten heroes

The travelling exhibition War and Colonies, 1914-1918, is meant first and foremost as a tribute to the colonial troops engaged in World War I. Having been dubbed the Great War, it  Read

Reza Aramesh's take on the rebellious subject

Advanced not as an agitprop but as an aesthetic intervention, Whistle of the Souls, a play that never starts: proposal for a public sculpture, was a solo exhibition by Reza Read

features

The identity politics of language and script in South Asia

In many parts of the world, the writing system of a language hardly attracts any political attention. For instance, most European languages are written in the same script – the so-called Read

writes CARMEN BRANDT

Re-cognizing transience in Taziyeh and Darbar

Transient architecture, in its self-conscious or 'accomplice' mode, achieves a transparency with time. Danish architect Aldo van Eyck described this process of internalizing time ('the growing body of experience') as  Read

writes SEEMA NUSRAT AMIN

Insinuation of 'dreams' in a city of 'despair'

A city has never been an agglomeration of built forms that accommodate the daily functionalities of living of its denizens; it is more than that. Nor is it the embodiment Read

writes SHARMILLIE RAHMAN

Diaspora art in the era of transnational flux

In many an account of the 20th and 21st century world art, the contribution of artists from Asia, Africa and other non-industrialized regions was seen as something of a peripheral Read

writes FIROZ MAHMUD

Feeling the Doublebind

The contexts of disruption and displacement cut deeply into the diasporic experience and thus the themes explored by the artists featured in Doublebind: Art of the South Asian Diaspora, an Read

writes DEBORAH FRIZZELL
subject / predicate

Exile in Calcutta : Reconnaissance of Displacement by Thomas Meyer

In 1947, the Border Commission drew a random line across the Bengal; even villages were cut in two. The Hindu-majority west remained a part of India. The Muslim populated east became Read

exposure

Atish Saha probes into the ambivalence of the self

Atish Saha's photographic odyssey, Religion is Personal, is a way for him to examine the limits of the self and its converging points with the community he was born into.  Read

The consequence of light

Abstract art was always called that for a reason, precisely because it is 'abstracted' from our surrounding physical reality, a reduced yet refined form of visual expression akin perhaps to  Read

writes ADRIAN DANNATT
encounter

Sites re-formed, objects transmuted

Mustafa Zaman: I am holding in my hand the catalogue from your 1993 exhibition – when we were at Dhaka Charukola, we had discovered a new artist – in whose language abstraction conflated Read

film review

Breaking through minimalism : Film as experiment of light

In the paper-cut starkness of a dichromatic landscape, where black and white film receives a new incarnation, in the fierce understatement of denuded visuals, the uncanny, unfamiliar approach to film Read

writes SEEMA NUSRAT AMIN
navigator

Aesthetic meditation on violence

Paradoxically titled Celebrated Violence was a collateral show framed by its curators Wakilur Rahman and Kehkasha Sabah and staged at Dhaka Art Center as a critical negotiation of art that Read

writes SHAKHAWAT TIPU

Conspiratual, the never-ending novum and its primal danger

A multiplied prototype, 'man', moves in single-line procession about an Enframing of the world where all but colour seems to be ordered by the destining of a (secret) code. Faceless Read

writes SEEMA NUSRAT AMIN

Sketches of self and beyond : Three-man exhibition at Shilpangan

In the exhibition entitled Appointment, the trio Barbara Bux, Frazana Ahmed Urmi, Syed Zahid Iqbal, at first glance, comes off as a group awakened to their 'self', who are also Read

writes GOLAM MORTUJA

Casting a position vis-à-vis the third gender

Cross-Casting, an exhibition which looks at the crossover between an awareness about a stigmatized social group (of the third gender, in this case) and the exploration of the new media Read

writes MUSTAFA ZAMAN

Of combines and combinatorial logic of new art and new space

Gallery Charja is a new space launched by Santaran, an artists' collective that originated in Chittagong, the port city of the country, which still remains their primary base. The exhibition Read

Pondering the postmaterial the wastepickers' idiom(s)

‘Waste not-Want not' must seem to be a predictably hackneyed adage to begin a study of an oeuvre, dedicated clearly and evidently to the idea(s) of waste. However clichéd,  Read

writes PAULA SENGUPTA

Sympathy for the othered in Shahid Kabir's recent works

With the tendency to see the sublime in the mundane, Shahid Kabir brings to the canvas glimpses of the peripheral and the marginal – namely, artists' models, shadhus and floating people Read

writes TAKIR HOSSAIN with DEPART DESK

Rahman's norm-defying,gravity-free freights

Artist A Rahman lent his efforts to showcase both the spectacular and the specular encountered by an individual eking out a life in the contemporary world, in his recent exhibition Read

writes SHAHMAN MOISHAN with DEPART DESK
reading room

‘Reading Bangkok' The deflected gaze in the e/il lusive city

It is tempting to read the porous polis that is Bangkok as a landscape shaped by intrusions; certainly some reviewers of Ross King's 'Reading Bangkok' (2011, NUS) have submitted to as  Read

writes SEEMA NUSRAT AMIN
panorama

The printmakers' progress : Kibria Print Fair at DAC

Having established itself as a site for appreciation and sale of works produced in the main mediums of the printmaking discipline, Kibria Print Fair has entered its third year in 2014.  Read

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